The number of Internet connections using mobile broadband continues to rise. With the introduction of flat rate—i.e. fixed price for an (almost) free data amount (or at least reasonable large, around 20 GB/month)—in combination with high performance modems for 3GPP High Speed Packet access (HSPA or HS) or 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular systems, many users actually skip fixed line subscriptions, such as Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Lines (ADSLs), and only rely e.g. on a Mobile Broadband (MBB) connection.
Recently, there have been a number of 3rd Generation (3G) and 4th Generation (4G) routers out on the market, where the user uses a subscription—e.g. by plugging in a Subscriber Identity Module (e.g. SIM) into the router, or into a modem assigned to the router (e.g. via Universal Serial Bus, USB)—and then via a short range communication system (such as Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN) included in the router, the entire household of the user may be connected to the Internet.
In many applications, it is to be expected that more than one device is connected e.g. to a gateway/router using e.g. short range communication (such as WLAN or Bluetooth®), and that in turn, the gateway/router is connected to the Internet e.g. via a cellular system connection, such as LTE, Wideband Code Division Multiple Access-High Speed (WCDMA-HS) or Enhanced General Packet Radio Service (EGPRS). One example may be Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications, for instance sensors, performing a measurement and sending a report on the measurement e.g. to the router. Further, the sensors may feed the information e.g. via a network connection to a data base.
Another example could be MBB users in a house with several apartments. Each apartment (which may constitute a user) may be connected to such a (cellular) router (e.g. a high end LTE-advanced modem). Instead of all users having their own (low-end) router (or modem), they share one high-end modem for high speed connection to Internet. Such a router (or modem) could be placed on an optimized position in order to exploit the best available radio channel conditions.
In the above-mentioned use-cases, the different users (or their respective devices) may have different network subscriptions (implemented e.g. by a Subscriber Identity module, SIM), typically placed in respective users smart phone, but via for instance a so-called soft SIM (involving a so-called Bluetooth® SIM connect CHECK message), the high-end modem may be used (and then, for example, 1 Gbit/s instead of 10 Mb/s as may be possible in the smart phone alone, can be achieved).